How the Police See Us, and How They Train Us to See Them

The first image you see when you play the video is the face of a black woman. She is sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle. Then the camera turns to a black male in the driver’s seat, leaned over, eyes half-closed, T-shirt slick with blood.

The woman, Diamond (Lavish) Reynolds, is narrating the shooting of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, 32, in Falcon Heights, Minn. Her 4-year-old daughter is in the back seat. A police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, stands outside, pistol drawn and aimed through the driver’s-side window, yelling obscenities.

“The police,” the woman says calmly, “they killed my boyfriend. He’s licensed to carry. He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out his pocket, and he let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.”

“Ma’am, keep your hands on the wheel!” the officer shrieks.

“I will, sir,” Reynolds reassures the officer. “No worries, I will.”

Castile is drawing his last breaths. Sickeningly, none of this feels jarring or unfamiliar. The true horror of the video is that there is a video at all, that Reynolds knows just what to do.

“I told him not to reach for it!” the officer shrieks.

“You told him to get his ID, sir,” Reynolds softly corrects. It isn’t until she’s handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser that she finally breaks down and sobs.

In a vacuum, it isn’t natural to pre-emptively shoot people to death, just as, in a vacuum, it isn’t natural to keep your gun trained on a person who has been rendered incapacitated and is bleeding out before you. This is specialized behavior, the sort expected from military forces entering unfamiliar war zones. Soldiers are trained to consider everyone and everything a potential threat, to neutralize any man, woman or child who could potentially cause them harm. The highest priorities are to protect themselves and to accomplish their mission, and that requires the trained dehumanization of the local population. In such an environment, the burden of not killing is lifted from the soldiers, and local people are tasked with the burden of not provoking death.

In a vacuum, the United States of America is not a war zone. Falcon Heights, Minn., is not a war zone. Dallas is not a war zone. The nation’s thruways are not war zones. In a vacuum, police officers shouldn’t kill the very citizens they swear to protect. But the police, especially officers who commute to patrol communities not their own, are — or can act very much like — an occupying force. You can see their training at work when an officer fires into a car with a 4-year-old child in it. You can see it when Reynolds is directed to get out of the car, lift her hands over her head and walk backward toward a group of officers: Her camera glimpses several guns aimed squarely at her back.

All of this is so routine, so imprinted through repetition, that despite Yanez’s panic, he was still drilled enough to keep his gun trained on a dying man. But Reynolds recognized a routine, too, and her actions showed how, just as in any war zone, the local population will eventually become trained as well.

“No worries.” Reynolds knows to de-escalate the situation by being reassuring, even encouraging, to the man who just shot her boyfriend. She knows that her boyfriend is likely to die. She knows to document everything, to give her own accounting of events, to create a record. She knows what will come next.

The steady advance of technology and the ubiquity of cellphones mean that more police violence is now caught on camera than ever before. If you so choose, you can go online and watch hours of footage of police officers killing black men, women and children all over the country. The Black Lives Matter movement has brought further national attention to state violence that goes unfilmed. Diamond Reynolds had most likely heard of Jamar Clark, an unarmed 24-year-old black man who was shot in nearby Minneapolis last year. Any or all of the names Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray and Laquan McDonald might have been familiar to her. These deaths all share similarities, and those similarities provide a lesson for Americans living in policed and occupied communities: Black people are approached as though inherently violent, and so any interaction with a police officer can end violently. A black person’s rights, even inalienable ones, can be stripped from them without due process. And, almost always, an officer who does so won’t be convicted of any wrongdoing.

And every incident, no matter how isolated, that takes the life of an officer — when Micah Johnson fires on Dallas police as they watch over a peaceful protest, when Ismaaiyl Brinsley bused in to New York to ambush police officers in their cruiser — brings with it the risk that all blacks will face the wrath of the state’s fear and retaliation, as officers scramble to “regain control” of the local population. This is seen as just, supported by the conceit that black citizens brought this upon themselves. The aggressive posture of the police, the fear that every man reaching for a wallet may be reaching for his weapon, only deepens. And everyone insisting on black citizens’ rights — to life, to due process, even to bear arms — is blamed for instigating violence against the police.

The night before Philando Castile was killed by the police in Minnesota, 37-year-old Alton Sterling was killed by the police in Baton Rouge, La. Two Baton Rouge officers, Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II, responded to a 911 call that a man was brandishing a gun at Triple S Food Mart, a local convenience store. Sterling was out front selling CDs, as he had been for years. He had a gun in his pocket. (Louisiana is an open-carry state.) The officers told him to get to the ground, pushed him against a car, then tackled and Tasered him. As Sterling was pinned, one of the officers lifted his gun inches from Sterling’s chest and fired twice. The officer paused, then fired four more times. Sterling died in the parking lot.

There’s a specific cadence to cop killings. State violence is so ubiquitous and visible that citizens, experienced, can recognize its approach. The Triple S’s owner, Abdullah Muflahi, caught the killing on video with his cellphone, pressing record when he saw the officers tackle his friend Sterling to the ground. Someone else was present, too: a member of a local organization called Stop the Killing, founded by a 43-year-old black activist named Arthur Reed. That person arrived after monitoring a police scanner and following the dispatcher’s directions to the convenience store. After hearing the officers claim that Sterling had caused his own death by reaching for his gun, the group released its footage.

The heroism of Reynolds, Muflahi and Reed in the face of occupying forces are minuscule, pyrrhic triumphs in an ever-rising sea of blood. The footage of both killings will force investigations. We know what comes next. Both Castile and Sterling will be further dehumanized; their pasts will be pillaged, and attempts will be made to recast both victims as the gunmen, the aggressors who brought their deaths upon themselves. The officers will argue that both shootings were in keeping with their training — that, in effect, they accomplished their mission. The police officers may even get off. They normally do.

The day after the deaths of Sterling and Castile, people took to the streets, in cities across the country, to protest the hail of bullets coming from the police. Those in Dallas found themselves in a hail of bullets aimed at the police, in a sniper attack that claimed the lives of at least five officers and injured seven more. Two civilians were also wounded, including one black mother who was shot in the calf while shielding her children.

This morning, Philando Castile’s mother, Valerie, protesting alongside Reynolds in Minnesota, was invited on CNN. The very first question Chris Cuomo asked was her reaction to the Dallas attacks. “Me? I don’t know anything about what happened in Dallas,” she responded. “My son died just the other day,” she added, “and I haven’t had sleep in almost 48 hours. So no, I haven’t been watching any television.” Later came a tweet from The Associated Press: “BREAKING: Family of man killed by Louisiana police rejects ‘reprehensible acts of violence’ against Dallas police officers.” It didn’t mention Alton Sterling’s name.

Correction: July 8, 2016

An earlier version of this article misstated the positions of Philando Castile and Diamond Reynolds in the video Reynolds posted. Castile had been driving; Reynolds was in the passenger seat.